ice age

Three 11,500-year-old deer skull headdresses – excavated from a world-renowned archaeological site in Yorkshire – will go on display, one for the first time, at Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) from today.

What connects a series of volcanic eruptions and severe summer cooling with a century of pandemics, human migration and the rise and fall of civilisations? Tree rings, says Ulf Büntgen, who leads Cambridge’s first dedicated tree-ring laboratory in the Department of Geography.

Using ancient DNA, researchers have created a unique picture of how a prehistoric migration route evolved over thousands of years – revealing that it could not have been used by the first people to enter the Americas, as traditionally thought.

A new study of how the structure of the ocean has changed since the end of the last ice age suggest that the melting of a vast ‘lid’ of sea ice caused the release of huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Populations of hunter-gatherers weathered Ice Age in apparent isolation in Caucasus mountain region for millennia, later mixing with other ancestral populations, from which emerged the Yamnaya culture that would bring this Caucasus hunter-gatherer lineage to Western Europe.

Research shows that a new Ice Age could well have been upon us in the next millennium were it not for increases in CO2 due to humans, despite the advantageous trend in solar radiation of our current age.